personal – our house | eleven11photo.com

it’s been a little while since i’ve done a personal post. this one is going to be a long one. it’s not photography related at all, so feel free to skip over it if you want! 🙂

josh and i closed on our house last week and moved in this past weekend!!! (including monday cuz we still weren’t finished lol).

let me tell you a little about our house hunting experience……. well it started over a year ago. we actually almost bought a small building downtown in OTR that we fell in love with. it was a total rehab job, and if any of you have ever tried to get financing for something like that you know that it is a huuuuge pain in the butt. so anyways, we found the building and went under contract. we were going to do an FHA 203K loan which means that you can get financed for the renovations along with the loan for the property. so we have our inspections completed, meet with a million contractors, have our bids in, plans drawn up (all of this takes months by the way), excited that we were finally a few weeks away from closing and our lender comes to us and tells us that there was a mistake and the building didn’t meet the requirements for that type of loan. what?!!! basically it was like them telling us, “complete these 20 steps to close on this building”, and we’re on step 19 and they tell us they were wrong about step 1. needless to say, we were absolutely heartbroken. also, needless to say, we switched lenders.

so now what? do we want to try again for a rehab, or do we look for a normal home? we knew we wanted something that had studio space for me and something with a lot of character. we looked online for months and drove by tons of places trying to find something that spoke to us, when one day josh stumbled upon a house just outside of the area we were looking in (we were hoping OTR or Northside area). i was in love. it was the type of house that if we were ever to buy a house is exactly what i would want. keep in mind we lived in a loft for the past 2.5 years so we loved that feeling, the high ceilings, big windows, etc which is one of the reasons we were looking for a building in the first place. we then had to decide, would it be best (and easier) to just buy a normal house? after a lot of contemplating, we decided as long as it had the amount of space we needed, it would just be so much easier. especially knowing the millions of hoops you need to jump through to buy a mixed use rehab and we just didn’t think we wanted to go through with all of that again.

we went to look at the house in St. Bernard and it was amazing, the area seemed super nice, and we were still close to northside and downtown like we wanted to be. we put in an offer, which was accepted and we were then told it was a short sale. ugh. we waited and waited, and were then told they had numerous other offers on the house and we needed to come in with our best. keep in mind, we were the first offer on the table. so for 6 loooong months we anxiously waited hoping that we had the top offer and the house would be ours.

just a few weeks ago we finally heard back and were shocked to find out the wait was worth it!

there were still a few things they needed to do since it was a short sale before they could give us our closing date. finally, they set closing for April 29th. then we were told the 20th. a week later, they said they moved it up to the 13th. we had already told our building manager the situation long before, so he was completely understanding of us moving whenever we wanted. so we started packing, because the 13th was literally just a few weeks away at this point. theeeeen, we got a call saying that we could close on the 5th! by this time we literally had less than a week’s notice and tons of packing to do!!!

we closed last thursday, had shoots + meetings on friday, so started moving on saturday. it was an extremely long process considering that a lot of our stuff was still not even packed. i can’t thank our friends cedric, ben, dave, and my family erin, dakota, kyle, and zack enough for helping us move. and also my sister bobbi jo and her boyfriend corey for helping us finish up on monday and clean our old apartment. we’ve spent the past few days trying to get it all organized as well as ripping out all of the carpet on the second floor! i am now a pro at prying out carpet strips and staples if anyone ever needs help!

i know there are a few people whose discs were mailed out a little late, and some others that i was hoping to get images to by this week, and i apologize for the delay, everything happened so suddenly that i wasn’t anticipating not being able to finish things this week. i appreciate everyone so much for being so understanding! i’m finally almost finished getting my office back together, so should be up and running this weekend. 🙂

sooooo, finally, here are some images of our new place!! josh + i seriously could not be happier right now, we are so thankful that we found the house of our dreams, and that our hard work and dedication paid off. we still can’t believe it’s ours. this was the only house we even looked at with our realtor, we just knew it was the one.